The Fox's Quest

by Anna Frost

  The

  Fox’s Quest

  Book Two of The Kitsune Trilogy

  Anna Frost

  An Imprint of

  The Fox’s Quest

  by Anna Frost

  Copyright © Anna Frost, 2013

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

  Musa Publishing

  633 Edgewood Ave

  Lancaster, OH 43130

  www.MusaPublishing.com

  Issued by Musa Publishing, March 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61937-600-7

  Head Editor: Elizabeth Silver

  Editor: Ralph Gallagher

  Artist: David Efaw

  Line Editor: Brianna Soloski

  Interior Book Design: Cera Smith

  For my fearless first reader, Faren, and for the infinitely supportive Mr. Frost.

  Prologue

  Yuki

  Years ago…

  The samurai stumbled out of the forest and into the shrine’s courtyard, the two swords at his side proof of his rank. His ponytail hung askew and wild bangs obscured his face. His clothes were no better; his kosode had once been blue and whole, but it now featured numerous rips and a dark stain spreading from the shredded left side. The hand pressed against the wound was coated in blood and every lurching step provoked the fall of fat red drops that splattered on the dusty ground.

  The sight compelled Yuki to rise from his kneeling position on the veranda, morning meditation forgotten, and step outside with no sandals to protect his pristine white socks. His steps, at first slow and hesitant, grew hasty when the strange apparition failed to vanish. It was real.

  A howl tore out of his throat. “Father, quick!”

  Yuki had seen wounds before, generally caused by beasts or accidents, but not often enough to desensitize him to the sight of abundant blood. The cloying scent assaulted his nose and he could smell nothing else. Struggling to remain calm and composed, he lent his support by sliding under the stranger’s arm on his unwounded side.

  “Thank you,” the samurai said with a sigh, leaning down so heavily Yuki feared he would collapse on the spot. If that happened, how would they ever get inside? There couldn’t have been more than a few years between them, yet the stranger had muscle enough to weigh twice what he did.

  “A little further,” Yuki encouraged the samurai, whose head was bent low and whose breathing came in uneven gasps.

  His father appeared in the doorway and disappeared again, presumably to fetch emergency supplies. They seldom had visitors, but when they did, it was often the villagers seeking help for problems beyond their knowledge, problems that were sometimes of the bloody kind.

  After navigating the three steps leading up to the building’s entrance, they stumbled inside. As soon as they were past the threshold, the stranger’s legs buckled and his weight brought them both to their knees.

  “Don’t die!” Yuki blurted. “We don’t even know your name!”

  “Put ‘Akakiba the Idiot’ on the grave marker,” the samurai said. It was spoken too bitterly to be a joke.

  Yuki’s father returned with his arms full of supplies, among them hot water and needles trailing thick thread, and set to work with steady hands. “Hold still now,” he said. “This must be sewn shut.”

  Though he knew better than to interrupt with a needless question, Yuki itched to ask what had happened. Weapons didn’t shred the flesh like this.

  The morning sun, undisturbed by human affairs, had meanwhile continued its steady rise in the sky. Its warm rays entered through the open door and fell upon the samurai’s sword, rebounding off a seal even the dimmest wits would have recognized. This seal, a stylized design of a fox’s head, proclaimed the sword’s owner to be from the Fox clan. Their specialty? Demon hunting.

  Chapter One

  Yuki

  Yuki knelt in grass damp from recent rainfall, gazing at his family’s grave and the numerous names on it. Most had been Shinto priests and shrine maidens, generation after generation. Would they resent him for breaking tradition?

  The last time he’d been here, the latest name carved in the stone monument had been his mother’s. Since then, someone had added both his father’s name and his own. The villagers must have presumed them both dead in the blaze that had transformed their tidy shrine into ruins and ashes.

  They’d only been half wrong. When the demon had set the place afire in an apparent attempt to take revenge upon the wounded samurai it sheltered, Yuki had been able to escape. His father, however, had never emerged. There had been no blood-curdling screams such as a man burning alive might have made; because of this Yuki dared hope his father had gone in his sleep, suffocated by the smoke.

  A shadow fell upon him. He looked up to find Akakiba holding out a handful of wildflowers.

  “Thank you.” Taking the flowers, Yuki laid them next to the bottle of sake and the burning incense he had brought as offerings.

  Akakiba hovered awkwardly, never straying far.

  “I can almost hear you blaming yourself,” Yuki said. “Stop it. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I brought the demon here.”

  “Demons come and go as they will. If you want to assign blame, blame my father and me. This was our shrine and we should have been able to protect our guests and ourselves. We failed you, not the other way around.” Not wishing to allow Akakiba to argue the point any further, he continued on a lighter tone, “I should have realized right there you’re not entirely human. In the morning you were nearly unconscious with blood loss, in the afternoon you slept so deeply I wasn’t sure you’d ever wake up, and that very night you were back on your feet and fighting a demon. I was so naïve it’s embarrassing.”

  Akakiba’s scowl didn’t lift. “I could have fallen into a healing trance in the forest, away from your shrine. It would have been better.”

  Ah. So much for avoiding the subject. “It wouldn’t have been better for you. The demon would have taken advantage of your vulnerability. You knew it and it’s why you kept going until you found the safety of a shrine. I’m right, am I not?”

  It was no mystery why Akakiba would blame himself; he was that kind of person. The mystery was why the demon had been able to attack the shrine. Yuki had no clear memory of what the shrine’s defenses had been, whether glyphs or other methods used by priests, and so he would never know what had gone wrong.

  It took an effort to make his voice cheerful again. “We can’t change the past. I’m glad you came and we met.”

  Akakiba didn’t reply, his expression dark. He was doing it again, using stubborn silence to win an argument. If previous occurrences were any indication, he wouldn’t talk again until a new subject came up.

  Yuki silently bid his parents goodbye before rising and turning away from death and the past. “Thank you for agreeing to the detour. I know it brought us off path.”

  “We’re in no hurry. I’m not convinced the spirit told the truth.”

  Oh, not that again. How many times must he tell Akakiba “the spirit” wasn’t pretending to be his little sister Sanae, but truly was? When her human body had died, the spirit part of Sanae ha
d escaped. Yuki believed this to be truth because he could see auras and he couldn’t have mistaken hers.

  Akakiba could see auras too, but denial blinded him. He’d overcome it in time. Hopefully.

  Sanae must have been lurking near for she chose that moment to shimmer into existence. When she had first manifested after her human body’s death, she had looked like a real fox with fur and fang, given away by nothing except the transparent quality of her body.

  These days she was still fox-shaped but lacked the lifelike details: her coat was a smooth red color without fur, her eyes were shining black oblongs without pupils or iris, and her nose was a black spot serving no breathing function. The most striking difference was in the number of tails. No longer had she a single tail; five of them fanned behind her.

  Yuki couldn’t tell whether this last detail was a conscious change, possibly made to reflect the legends that claimed the number of tails on a fox spirit indicated its strength, or an unconscious one. If it were the latter, did it mean there was truth to the legends?

  We should be on our way, Sanae said, her words blooming in their heads without the intervention of their ears. The longer we wait the more magic it steals from us.

  “You don’t even know what ‘it’ is,” Akakiba said for the hundredth time.

  That’s why I need you to go look, Brother, Sanae replied for the hundredth time. Now hurry up!

  She vanished in the same manner she’d appeared.

  “Well then,” Yuki said after shouldering the traveling pack that contained their food supply along with other essential items, “let’s go and find out what ‘it’ is. Are you coming, Drac?”

  The dragon, who had slumbered in the sun all afternoon, bestirred himself. Yuki felt his grumpy reluctance almost as if it were his own and he answered by broadcasting his amusement the same way. He couldn’t have explained how the mental bond worked, no more than he could explain how he breathed.

  Drac had grown big enough that he could now mount up on his own, provided the horse didn’t spook when he reared to grab the saddle with his front claws in order to haul himself up. This time, the horse didn’t even lift its head from the grass.

  “Good boy,” Yuki murmured, patting the horse’s neck. To Drac, who was now draped half into his lap and half on the horse’s hindquarters, he said, “If you grow any bigger you’ll need your own horse.”

  “I’m done growing,” Drac said. Feelings were easy to convey through their mind bond but spoken words were better for conversation.

  Yuki eyed his scaly companion. “Certainly not. Your mother was bigger than a horse.”

  “She was sexually mature. I won’t allow myself to become mature for some time.”

  “Ah? Allow yourself?”

  “I’m yet unsexed. Unless I choose to trigger the process that’ll bring me to sexual maturity, I shouldn’t grow much more.”

  “Oh. That’s good then.”

  If Drac grew no further, then his weight shouldn’t be a problem. Unless he did choose to leave and mature.

  Sensing his concern, Drac sent him reassurance that, were it spoken in words, would mean “I won’t abandon you.”

  They left behind a clearing in which remained no overt sign of human habitation besides the family grave and a single red gate at the top of a flight of stairs carved into the mountainside. All other remains were hidden by the long grass.

  The trail they followed took them deeper into the forest, into places where humans seldom went and trees extended branches across the trail to slap at mounted travelers.

  Yuki watched the woods, practicing his newly developed skills. Being able to see the life sparks of living creatures didn’t mean much if he couldn’t learn to distinguish them or read their details. There was a certain tree just ahead, too large for human arms to encircle, with discolored spots on its leaves. Was it sick? Was that why its spark seemed faded?

  “Yuki!” Akakiba was no longer in sight, hidden by the trees ahead, but his voice carried back.

  “Sorry!” He urged his mount to greater speed until they’d caught up, then fell back into his thoughts. What he could see in living creatures, that spark, it felt like the same energy that made up spirits. Dead things didn’t have it.

  If Sanae was right, she’d found an object that sucked spiritual energy from the world. This mysterious object had to be responsible for weakening supernatural creatures of all kinds. It felt hungry, Sanae said. What would that mean for physical beings and their little sparks? What was the nature of the sparks? Souls? Life itself? What would happen if they got eaten too? He didn’t want to find out the hard way.

  Chapter Two

  Sanae

  Sanae had come to the conclusion that losing one’s physical body and existing as a pure soul, a spirit, wasn’t all that bad. People with bodies knew nothing of the way forest spirits sang, the melody not so much a sound as a feeling, one that reverberated in her essence. People with bodies had never experienced the complete freedom of drifting through the world like a leaf on the wind. People with bodies were limited by their physical eyes. Human words were inadequate to describe the things she could now see.

  But people with bodies had one undeniable advantage: they could eat dessert.

  Sanae stared at the tiny roadside shrine. Someone had left a sweet red bean bun before it as an offering. Whenever she tried to close her jaws on it, they just went through it. She couldn’t even smell it.

  This is ridiculous, she ranted at the world in general. Why do people leave offerings of food and sake if spirits can’t taste them? How did it get started? Offerings were supposed to be about respect, but this felt like taunting. Look at this delicious bun you can’t have!

  Very well, then. She glowered at the bun before turning round and “walking” away.

  What to do now? It was boring waiting for Yuki and her brother to arrive. Physical bodies couldn’t go very fast. Perhaps she should go and ensure her discovery hadn’t undergone any change since she’d last visited.

  She shifted to the other side of reality, to the spirit side. Applying human words to this place was inaccurate but she had no better words to use. Everything was layered in different shades of what she might as well call gray. Living things from the other side were paler than shadows here, barely noticeable except for the fact they had little lights—soul sparks—in them. But even those lights were dim compared to the lights of spirits who existed on this side. The other spirits here were like her, bright and free. They floated or zoomed past, each about its own business. She didn’t try to talk to them. She had tried, at first, to ask them about her mysterious discovery and what they knew about it. They hadn’t seemed to understand her questions and she certainly hadn’t understood a word of their answers—not that they used anything that could be called words.

  Ah, she’d have time enough to learn about her fellow spirits’ way of thinking after she found out how to end the draining of spiritual energy from the world. By following the flecks of her spirit body that broke away when she didn’t guard herself closely, she’d found out from where the pull came.

  But knowing where it was didn’t tell her what it was, for the simple reason she couldn’t approach it. If she went too close, whether in the physical world or in the spirit realm, its power began to suck at the edge of her being with frightening strength. As she had no desire to be sucked into what might be complete and final death, she had to rely on others to investigate.

  The area around the mysterious energy-eating object had the look of a wasteland. Spirits had fled or been consumed and living things that couldn’t move had their soul sparks sucked away slowly, so the trees and plants were dead or dying. Even with the limitations of flesh, Yuki and Akakiba would know when they were near.

  Sanae paced at the edge of what she considered the safe zone, the area where plants were yet
clinging to life. The mysterious thing was calling to her essence in an insistent way, but she wasn’t fool enough to get any closer. Just fool enough to come back again and again, to fret and wonder. What was it? Why was it stealing spirit energy? Could it be stopped? What if it was a living being rather than a thing? Must they kill it?

  Sanae froze. Without really noticing, she’d taken a few steps toward danger. Lingering here, where the object of her obsession might lure her to her death, wasn’t such a good idea.

  Ahhh, I need a distraction! Her exclamation was a tiny ripple of life in this deserted place, noticed by no one but her. She forced herself away from the fascinating pull.

  Held back by no such constraints as physical distance, she could go anywhere she wished and still be back before Yuki and Akakiba arrived. It had taken her time to understand how to travel to a physical place via the spiritual realm, but now it was as easy as breathing. Or as easy as it had been, back when she actually had the body parts needed for breathing.

  From within the spirit realm, Sanae sought her father’s spiritual signature. It was like picking out a specific star in a sky of millions. She could only do it with people whose spiritual signatures she knew intimately. Once she’d found the distant flicker of her father’s existence, she headed for it.

  Neither wind nor physicality held her back, so she streaked away like a shooting star, faster and faster, feeling her existence stretching infinitely long, feeling the passage of other spirits through her, and her through them. The contact tickled, reassured. She was not alone here, but one in a million, in a billion.

  When Sanae reached the spark of spiritual energy that was her father’s presence in this realm, she stopped and focused, seeking to once again ooze through the veil between the worlds like light through thin curtains. She pooled herself into a coherent whole on the other side, adopting the shape of a fox with multiple tails.